


seal my heart and break my pride

by 75hearts



Series: venty lucretia drabbles [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Denial, Dissociation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Insomnia, Psychosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 10:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14042157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/75hearts/pseuds/75hearts
Summary: Days on the moon last weeks, not hours. Lucretia tells herself that's the only reason she's been awake for so long.





	seal my heart and break my pride

Lucretia stays up all night and she doesn’t even really notice.

She has to work. She is writing, head craned down, scribbling away, and so she just… keeps going. The sun won’t set, not for days now; this is the price of living on the moon. Days are weird, here, random 12-hour chunks untethered from the brightness of the sun or the darkness of the night. Not that her sleep rhythms were synced up to a single sun, anyway. Not that her sleep rhythms have been synced up to  _ anything  _ since she first left her home plane. Her shoulders ache, her hand aches. She doesn’t care. This is important. She has to make up for everything she has done, and the way to do that is work. The tiredness, the ache: this is her justice, this is her penance. She hasn’t cared in so long that she doesn’t really notice. It is annoying background noise, irrelevant to the thing that is important: the work, always the work.

She stops writing, pulls over a map to pore over, comparing notes with map with notes again. She yawns, a little.

The next day, she barks orders as usual, assigning everyone to their work. She feels light and airy, her head buzzing and painful, like it is too big for her skull. She shakes it off as best as she can and continues to work.

That night, she is more aware that she has been awake a long time. She still doesn’t care, not like she probably should. It’s just a fact: the sky is blue, and Lucretia has been awake, working. It’s good, she reasons. She gets more done while awake. Every hour of sleep is an hour not spent working; every hour not spent working is an hour not spent fixing her mistakes; every mistake left unfixed is a family torn apart, a friend in pain, a town destroyed. And besides, she figures, she’s not  _ that  _ tired. Her sleep wouldn’t be good, anyway, nightmare-riddled, hours of tossing and turning, fear and self-hatred fighting each other as she lies only half-asleep in bed. So it’s better, for her, for everyone, to just stay up. Just a little bit longer, she tells herself. Just a little bit longer.

She can’t tell if she’s staying up selfishly or selflessly or both. She drinks wine, straight from the bottle, as she works, until the buzzing in her head is no longer from pain and she no longer cares about her motives. All she can focus on is the paper in front of her. 

The next day, the bottle is empty, and her headache is back with a vengeance. She feels like she is laser focused, but every few hours, she will let herself slip--just for a moment--and loses herself, often coming back to the world somewhere different, surrounded by different people, the clock reading a different time. Each time, she doubles down, focusing harder, trying her damndest not to let herself slip. She’s at once more serious and more silly than she normally is, giving everyone extra training while jokes slip out of her mouth. 

That night, she just sits in her office and catalogues the dead from the relics and hopes that the list is complete, that she will never have to add to it more casualties. She loses track of where she's at, so many times. After a while, the names and stories blend into each other. Every time, she starts over. She has them all memorized, knows each death intimately. There are so many. She prays that there will not be more. She works because she does not trust her prayers. 

She drinks from a glass, this time, but it feels like it is always being refilled. Then again, her grasp on time has left her; there is only this room, only this room and these names and this wine, dark red, and this bright sunlight that comes through her blinds and burns her eyes, and that is how it is. She doesn't know how long she's been here like this, doesn't trust herself to know. 

She hears someone knock at the door, checks it. Nobody. She finishes off her glass, goes back for more. Again and again, she hears the knock at the door; again and again, nobody is there. She's shaking now. The slices of light on the wooden floor shift and transform, becoming wobbly fires on the ground that coalesce and disappear when she focuses on them. She knows that it's just light, that it can't hurt her, but can't quite bring herself to walk through the illusory flames, tiptoeing around to check the door again before sitting down and resuming her count. In the most shadowy parts of the room, she sees figures, moving, shifting. She gets up and there’s no warning, no colors swimming before her eyes, no slow constricting of vision before it turns into blackness: one moment she is standing, and the next she is falling, until finally she is horizontal on the floor, resting at last. Her breathing is deep and regular. She does not dream.

 

Carey is the one who finds Lucretia, passed out in her office. The others were worried when she didn't show up that day, of course, but Carey was the only one with the fearlessness to try and break into the Director’s office. 

It was easier than expected: the door was unlocked. The door is never unlocked. It's not like the Director to forget that. Then again, it's not like the Director to miss work without telling anyone. “Hello?” Carey calls out. She almost trips over Lucretia’s prone body, which she notices with a start, immediately bending down and checking the pulse (regular, strong). She shakes Lucretia gently, and then harder. “Wake up. Are you okay?”

“Mmmm,” Lucretia mumbles. “Uuuugh. M fine.” She turns over, tries to slip back into the blissful darkness of oblivion, but Carey is still shaking her, still talking, and she's missed it. She should be professional, she thinks, but it's a distant thought, and fleeting. “S ok. Lemme--” She cuts off abruptly as she is hit by another round of pain and exhaustion rippling through her body, as she goes limp again, body giving up on her.

“Director?” Carey checks Lucretia’s pulse again, just in case. Still fine. “Hold on, I’m going to get help,” she says, even though she knows that the Director can't hear her. Carey lets her limp body fall to the floor and stands up, running for the med bay. Most of their clerics are out on missions right now, but even if there was only one, it’d be enough.

 

Lucretia wakes up in a very bright domed room on a very white bed. The infirmary. She blinks a few times, head swimming. 

She is not happy to be awake. She wants, more than anything else, to close her eyes again, go back to sleep, blackness cocooning her forever. 

She does not. She sits up, ignores the dizzying lightheadedness, the way the world swims in front of her eyes. She can’t see when she says, “Thanks for the concern, everyone, but I’m fine.”

“But, but-- Director--”

“I said I’m fine. Excuse me, I’m going to go back to work now.” She tries to stand up and almost falls again. She catches herself, but she can’t move, not for a moment. Her face is blank, carefully schooled neutrality masking everything, but she is almost certain that she is visibly not-fine and she hates it, hates the feeling of vulnerability, of weakness, in front of her employees. She keeps her balance, now, and she can’t see but it doesn’t show in the confidence of her walk. Her chin is up, her robes swishing around her feet, the facade of Madame Director firmly back in place. The door swings shut behind her, leaving everyone in the room flustered and quietly shocked but unsure what to do.

In her room, Lucretia tidies up her papers, moving them into neat stacks. The most recent ones are hurried, scribbled, confused, not quite coherent.  _ If obsidian circle--patches tubes bracing, in domes--the first moon maybe? and the voidfish was bright when Johann, like fire--and-- _

She stops reading after that, puts them at the bottom. She’ll go through them later, throw out the worst ones. For now, it doesn’t matter.

She pulls out a blank sheet of paper, brain clear again, clear enough to get back to work. She promises herself that she won’t let herself get this bad again, that those hours awake harmed her work and set her back more than it helped, but even as she makes it she knows it is an empty promise. She can never quite resist the temptation of  _ another few minutes, and then maybe she’ll find something, maybe she’ll figure out how to fix it all _ . She is a good liar, but not good enough to override her knowledge that she is absolutely full of shit.

“Davenport?” she calls. “Coffee, please!”

“Davenport!” he yells back, feet shuffling to obey, and it hurts worse than her pounding head. She does not deserve distraction, but she gives it to herself anyway: she dips her quill into the inkwell and begins to write. Later that day, she gives orders as always, and when they all ask her if she’s okay she smiles and reassures them. Carey campaigns for her to take a break, eyes worried, and she politely declines, over and over.

“It’s kind of you to be worried, but I’m okay, I promise,” she says. It is not the first time she has looked a friend in the eye and lied, nor will it be the last.

It is still bright outside. In all this time, the sun has not set. She tells herself that that is why she let this go this far. She still hasn’t mastered lying to herself well enough to believe it. Maybe if she were able to lie to herself as easily as she can lie to her friends she would be happier.

Then again, maybe not.


End file.
